Myanmar earthquake

M7.7 on the well-known Sagaing Fault; unreinforced homes collapsed.

The rare, high-impact event that was always coming, and was always going to be called unforeseeable afterwards.

Room: Q2 The Coconut
Year: 2025
Impact: 3,600+ lives
Sector: Seismic
Region: Asia-Pacific
Category: Environmental

Why this room

The physical hazard itself is a textbook Q2 coconut, a mapped fault with a calculable magnitude-probability payoff and known engineering countermeasures, but weak code enforcement and an active civil war turned the tail outcome into something closer to Q3/Q4 territory, where a single well-understood trigger cascades into governance collapse and violence with a payoff no actuarial table captured.

The record

Magnitude 7.7 (some sources 7.7-7.9), March 28 2025, 12:50 pm local time, Sagaing Fault, epicenter near Mandalaycertain
Rupture length approximately 460 km along the Sagaing Fault; supershear rupture speedlikely
AHA Centre count (as of April 8 2025): 3,645 fatalities, 148 missing, 4,817 injured in Myanmarlikely
Some sources cite up to 5,352 dead in Myanmar plus 103 in Thailand and 1 in Vietnam (includes later toll revisions and Bangkok high-rise collapse)uncertain
157,000+ buildings identified as likely damaged across seven citieslikely
Mandalay: 36% of buildings damaged; Woundwin: 73% of buildings damagedlikely
At least 3 hospitals destroyed, 22 more damagedlikely
~200,000 people left homelesslikely
World Bank: direct physical damage ~US$11 billion, ~14% of GDP; residential damage ~US$4.97 billion (45% of total)likely
World Bank: earthquake to cut Myanmar FY2025/26 GDP growth by about 2.5 percentage points, ~US$2 billion output losslikely
Junta launched 550+ aerial and artillery attacks in the two months after the quake despite declaring a ceasefirelikely
2016 Myanmar National Building Code cited as inadequately enforcedcertain

Sources

The book

This entry is one of 111 in the register. The full story, and what it cost the people who lived it, is in Risky Business by Claudia Zeisberger, David Munro and Joanna Reijgersberg-Siew.

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